I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.